What will happen first: Air Taxis or Space Tourism?
What do you believe to be here first: air taxis or space tourism? Robert Thielicke, Chief Editor of Technology Review (MIT Review), asked this question to a panel of industry experts from both, the air taxi and the space industry last week.
The experts answer was surprisingly simple: Both is already reality. US space tourism company Space Adventures offers private space trips since almost 20 years. Dennis Tito, their first customer, booked a trip to the International Space Station (ISS) using a Soyuz spaceship as early as 2001. Considering the sticker price of more than 20 million USD, this form of space tourism has seen not seen much increase in demand since then. The company has organized a grand total of 7 tourism trips to the ISS so far and two more are planned for next year. In the area of eVTOL technology, or air taxis, there have been some spectacular demonstration flights, too. Notably, Volocopter showed their capabilities in 2017 in Dubai and 2019 at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart and Chinese air taxi manufacturer EHang realized a manned flight in 2019 in Changchun, China. However, unlike space tourism there has not been any commercial service established yet. So are both air taxis and space tourism already reality?
There is very nice quote on this by science-fiction author William Gibson:
The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.
These first examples show that current technology is capable of realizing both, space tourism and air taxis. Yet these are only weak signals for predicting whether these ideas will eventually transform into innovations. It important to note that a new idea by itself is not yet an innovation; it could merely be regarded as a concept or a thought. The process of converting these thoughts into tangible new artifacts (usually a product, a service or a process) is usually called invention. That is the stage we entered with air taxis and space tourism. There is a lot of groundwork still to be done in both industries, in terms of technological development as well as regulatory procedures. Yet, a lot of progress will be made in the next years by companies such as Volocopter and Virgin Galactic, who currently work hard on the both aspects. But to become a full blown innovation, the technology must become 1) financially viable and 2) desirable. This phase, the exploitation of the new technology, is yet to come for both industries. While there is little agreement on the wording, the constituting aspects for the definition of innovation are:
Idea + Invention + Exploitation = Innovation.
The widespread acceptance of air taxis and space tourism will thus mainly depend on its viability as a business model and the desirability among the majority of the population. Especially the later was considered the crucial step by all members of the discussion panel in Stuttgart. Thus I believe it deserves some more attention. What is the state of scientific research on innovation acceptance? The field’s theoretical underpinnings stem from two disciplines: from psychology, most notably from the Theory of Planned Behaviour by Ajzen, and from sociology, most notably from Everett Roger’s Diffusion Paradigm. The most widely employed theory in scientific innovation research is the so called UTAUT (Unified theory of acceptance and use of technology). In its latest addition (UTAUT2) the individual decision to accept an innovation can be explained by 7 distinctive factors:
Performance Expectancy, Effort Expectancy, Social Influence, Facilitating Conditions, Hedonic Motivation, Price Value and Habit.
Maybe not surprisingly, our recent research on air taxi acceptance found Hedonic Motivation as the most important factor for the decision to use air taxis, followed by Performance Expectancy. Hedonic Motivation in this case mainly reflects the enjoyment of flying, the experience of seeing a city from birds eye. Performance Expectancy is the more rational function associated with air taxis: flying over congested city routes and saving travel time. Social Influence got rather mixed results, with only a about a third of respondents clearly stating that they would see air taxis as a status symbol — see our full research results here: Whitepaper Acceptance of Airtaxis.
Nasa/ Lillian Gipson.
While there are no comparable studies for space tourism, it is reasonable to assume that Hedonic Motivation would also score as a main determinant for the decision to book a flight to space. Yet, I would expect the Social Influence to be an even stronger factor, especially for the early adopters. Imagine the conversation “Hey, have you heard that John just went on holidays to space ?” — that would definitely leave a mark on any cocktail party discussion. Regarding the Performance Expectancy, however, the situation looks very different. The functional, or rational argument for flying to space for touristic purposes will be rather limited as long as there are no destinations in space to travel to. At the same time mega cities around the globe with an increasingly dense population are generating more and more potential fields for air taxis to show their potential. Especially when ground traffic becomes obstructed by water, as in New York or Singapore, the rational argument for air taxis prevails.
So the race is on, and the next 3–5 years will show whether space travel or air taxis will win the race to become a mass market phenomenon. If I had to, I would put my bets on air taxis to be slightly ahead of space travel in terms of consumer acceptance.
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